Telecommunications service providers generally provide telecommunication services to their customers under a variety of service plans. Such service plans are generally associated with one or more devices, such as a wireless telephone, and generally require a subscriber to pay a basic, e.g., monthly, fee for using the device on a telecommunications network. Such service plans further generally impose various surcharges for services falling into certain categories. Some types of calls may be free of surcharges, such as calls made at certain times of day, e.g., during “night” or “weekend” periods, or calls made to other customers of the same service provider. Further, in many cases, a surcharge is not assessed for a call in a particular category until the customer's usage in that category for a particular billing period, e.g., month, is surpassed. However, once a base amount of time included in a service plan for a given service in a given period has been used, a surcharge may be imposed for additional usage of the given service, e.g., on a per minute basis. Additionally, extra charges may be imposed for other services, such as long-distance calls, international calls, calls to customers of a different service provider, or calls made from outside a predetermined geographic area. Where data services are provided, surcharges may be imposed for data provided at a rate above a predetermined rate, at quantities over a certain amount per time period (e.g., 10 MB per month), at certain times of day, in certain geographic areas, etc. It has become more and more common for such service plans to be offered for all kinds of telecommunications services, including wireless telephone services, “land line” telephone services, etc.
Unfortunately, in light of the different charges that may be assessed at different times for different services, it is presently difficult for telecommunications customers to be aware of surcharges as they are being incurred. For example, it is presently difficult for a customer to be aware of both the time of a phone call and whether there is a surcharge for calls at that time, and also to be aware of the amount of usage during a billing period for the type of call being made or received. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that information regarding a customer's usage provided by a service provider generally lags the customer's actual usage for the present billing period. Customers presently are forced to estimate or even guess the extent to which they have used services covered by a basic monthly fee, and the extent to which they have incurred charges above the basic monthly fee.
Further, information presently provided to users of telecommunications devices, such as wireless telephones, is insufficient for users to determine whether a surcharge is being incurred. For example, a user may see an icon that indicates “roaming.” However, present icons are not actually associated with a determination of whether a surcharge will be applied to a call. Moreover, a user is unlikely to know whether, for a particular calling plan, the icon is associated with a surcharge. Accordingly, presently displayed icons are confusing at best, and suffer from significant drawbacks related to determining whether a surcharge applies to a call.